International Peaceand Security

Insights

Iran’s Nuclear Standoff

Grantees in this story

A new path for nuclear energy in Iran is laid out in an analysis co-authored by Carnegie Corporation grantee Siegfried S. Hecker with Stanford University Iran scholar Abbas Milani. As published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the report draws from lessons learned through the South Korean and Japanese nuclear experiences and offers a strategy for ending the standoff in Iran. It concludes that “Tehran should decide to abandon its enrichment efforts because the costs—technological, economic, and political—are not worth the price of keeping the nuclear weapon option open.”

Hecker builds on a recent opinion piece written with Corporation grantee William J. Perry and published by The New York Times. The authors say, “If Iran’s endgame really is a civilian nuclear power program, it will require a fundamentally different approach. The best economic option for Tehran would simply be to get out of the nuclear fuel-cycle business altogether, but this is unlikely given Iran’s insistence on its sovereign right to nuclear energy.”

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